Tuesday, December 17, 2013

This is a talk I gave during the year at the 'Dialogues Through Literature' event in Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim. If you can stick with it you'll get to the film bit eventually. The talk is intended to question of the drift in our policy assumptions, and the loss of audiences, rather than as a call for some sort of prescriptive, chauvinistic approach.

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Local / Place

When I was contacted about taking part in this event I had no idea that it had been
initiated by and was being held at the local GAA club here in Ballinamore.I’m not really a GAA man, being originally
from Limerick – heartland of Munster rugby
– and having spent most of my formative years and working life in Dublin. I wondered, thinking about
‘the local’ and ‘place’, if there might be a bigger divide to cross than the
Shannon at Drumsna when I made my way here from home amongst ‘the
Rossies’ in north Roscommon.

I may have had
this anxiety because we live at a time in Ireland – in the realm of what
passes for public discourse, at any rate – when what separates us is amplified to
such an extent that it suppresses what unites us.Divisions are fomented between urban and
rural, between old and young, between ‘up there’ and ‘down here’, and, most of
all - between ‘them’ and ‘us’, however and by whom ‘them’ and ‘us’ may be
defined.

Perhaps this is part
of a national preoccupation with ‘who’ we are and ‘where’ we come
from.But if this is how we ground our
sense of ourselves then the danger is that it all too easily may become a barrier
between us.

I live now in
the townland of Cuilmore.Our nearest
neighbours live in the townland of Creta, on the other side of a hedge and
ditch that almost certainly predate our house, itself around 200 years
old.So, although our neighbours live less
than 150 metres away they have a different address. They are from a different
place.

That said, we
have more in common with our neighbours than the boundary between us.Just as my having been raised and schooled at
the heart of Dublin 4 might be, as they say, ‘a long way from here’, I can at
least tell you that I grew up on the same road and went to the same national
school as the captain of the 1994 Leitrim Connacht
Championship-winning football team.He
grew up in number 22, I grew up in number 46, albeit fifteen years ahead of
him.

It is, I think we
can all agree, a small country.Once
while on holiday in my teens, slouching along on my own into the centre of Limerick city, I was stopped by a complete stranger on O’Connell Avenue.“You must be one of the Sheehys,” he
said.“Which are you?”Although I saw myself as a Dubliner on
holiday it seems I was in fact in my native place.

But others knew
that better than I did myself. Or had they the right to claim me? As a callow teenager I felt I’d been ‘placed’
in the sense of being identified or labeled – a feeling that at my age was more
than semantically close to feeling being ‘put in my place’, or to the social
convention of ‘knowing one’s place’.

If we do have at
once both a simple and a complicated relationship with place in real life, then
our relationship with our own place as it is imagined is arguably even more
complex.

The first film I
saw as a child that showed me the place I was living was a film called Rooney which I saw on black and white
television sometime towards the end of the 1960s.It’s a story about the love life and travails
of a Dublin
bin-man, filmed in 1957. It even includes
footage of the 1957 All-Ireland Hurling Final between Kilkenny and Waterford because the lead
character wins an all-Ireland medal during the course of the film.

Not only was Rooney filmed on roads like the one I
lived on, but the bin truck in the film was the same as the one that collected
our rubbish every Monday.And, to top it
all, one of the bin crew hefting the bins was played by the actor Noel Purcell
– you might have seen him in the 1962 Mutiny
on the Bounty with Marlon Brando – who lived just up the road from our
house.It amazed me then that a film
could be made about people and places that were so familiar to me in real life.

Two decades
later, and now writing about film, I tracked down Rooney again and made an unexpected discovery.It wasn’t really a Dublin, or even an Irish story at all.It was based on a book with the same title by
Catherine Cookson, published in 1956, and set in the writer’s birthplace, South
Shields, Newcastle-on-Tyne in north east England.Needless to say, Catherine Cookson’s
protagonist didn’t go anywhere near Croke
Park, let alone win an all-Ireland
hurling medal.

So where did
this leave me?I felt somehow that I had
been duped – that this Irish film wasn’t in fact an Irish film at all.But then isn’t it the function of every
fiction film to dupe its audience, to have them believe that something that is
not true, might be true?To make a place
– be it our own place, or a foreign place, or a futuristic place, or an alien place
– believable?To construct a fiction so
powerful that the screen, or the page, cannot contain it?

The answers here
are undoubtedly Yes, Yes and Yes, but there remains a compelling, if
recessive anxiety involving the soul and the captured image when the story
being told, the pictures that represent us, is close to the place we know as
home.The functional reasons for Rooney
being filmed in Ireland and
adapted as an Irish story are fairly simple – there was a financial inducement
for British film producers to come to Ireland to make films in the late
1950s and early 1960s, just as there is today.But the result then as now was a number of Irish films that were Irish
in every respect except for their authorship.

There is a
memorable line at the bottom of the first page of the first chapter of Dermot
Healy’s memoir, ‘The Bend for Home’.He writes, “It’s in a neighbour’s house fiction begins.”It is a great line, and all the better for
being open to various interpretations.One
interpretation being perhaps that our neighbours make up stories about us.However, if it is our lives that give rise to our neighbours’ fictions, whether
they are 150 metres away, or several thousand miles away, might we begin to
think they were bad neighbours?Might we
begin to assert our right to tell our own stories?Might we in turn make up stories about them,
or might we begin to tell stories for them rather than for ourselves?

This year a film, ‘Jimmy’s Hall’, is being
made about one of Leitrim’s historical figures, the politically radical James
Gralton.He built a dance hall at
Effernagh, not far from Carrick-on-Shannon, in the 1920s, and challenged the
religious and political authorities of the day.The hall was shot at and later firebombed and razed to the ground and, although
an Irish citizen, Gralton was deported in 1932. He died a doorman in Manhattan in 1945.

The film is directed by Ken Loach – who made ‘The
Wind that Shakes the Barley’ in County
Cork some years back –
and it will be produced by the same companies responsible for that film.Like as not this will be identified as an
Irish film, a film very much of Leitrim and dramatising a historically
important story.However, and without
doubting the bona fides of all
involved, I can’t help but feel again that recessive anxiety involving the soul
and the captured image.

Is this a form
of cultural sleight of hand or are all our stories fair game for whoever wants
to discover them or make them up? Will
Ken Loach’s version of historical Leitrim be any different, any less accurate
or any less sensitive to local nuance than that created by an Irish director?

If an Irish
story is essentially a product that may be told by anyone, then is it
any wonder that films like ‘Leap Year’
get made, or the earlier ‘Waking Ned’
which didn’t even film in Ireland, they went the whole hog and faked it on the
Isle of Man.

More seriously,
one has to wonder why historical Irish stories like the Gralton project are not
being brought to production by Irish writers and directors. Why is it that they seem mostly to be engaged
in telling stories that have much of the particularity of their origins reduced
so that they become ersatz Anglo-American films.And do I sense also that many Irish writers
of genre fiction are now writing stories ‘for the international market’ that
are set outside Ireland?

If this is a
trend, then should we be worried that our collective imagination is losing the
spark it found in the traditional geographical space we think of as ‘local’? That it has exchanged the universality of what
is local and slipped or shifted into a globalised cultural ‘place’ where the
reference points are those places to which we have for so long escaped in our
imaginations that they now seem as much or more like home than home itself?

This might
explain how it is that Irish films are pretty much foreign to Irish cinema
audiences. New York and
LA are more familiar than, say, Galway on an
Irish cinema screen.It is as if
the metaphorical mirror that we hold up to life twists uncontrollably in our
hands, allowing us to see in it only the oblique reflection of others, and less
and less often ourselves.

We are left then
with Wilde’s dictum, that "Life imitates art far more than art imitates
Life". Unfortunately the art we imitate
in our lives in this age seems increasingly less likely to be our own art.

It has to be said,
too, that the creative process does not take place in a vacuum, it takes place
in a context that has a bearing not just on the author’s subject material but
that also influences the commercial decision-making of intermediary businesses between
authors in all mediums and their audiences. This is a world in which
consolidation, contraction and new economies of scale make it harder and
harder for niche films and niche books to find audiences. Or, even when
those audiences can be discovered, there may be insufficient
financial return to the writers and film makers to enable them to
continue writing and making films.

Right now it is difficult
now to see how things will work out. We have to hope that new
and distinctive voices and willing audiences will be able to find each other,
even as this dramatic change is underway. Better still that we find new, active and participatory ways in which authors
and audiences can encounter and relate to each other ‘in the moment’, ‘live’, at local events
such as this, and in places such as this.